[SciPy-user] FW: Vector orientation (pedantry?)

[Perry Greenfield]

Since Stephen was unable to post this directly, he asked me
to do so for him -- Perry

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Walton [mailto:stephen.walton at csun.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 2:02 PM
To: scipy-user at scipy.net
Subject: Vector orientation (pedantry?)


This is probably a historical thing but I had to ask.  MATLAB
distinguishes between row and column vectors, so that the inner (dot)
and outer products are a simple matter of switching the order of
multiplication.  Numeric forces one to use outerproduct(); 
matrixmultiply() always returns the inner product of two vectors whether
they are row, column, or a mixture.

MATLAB is mathematically correct, in my opinion.  How much pain would it
cause for matrixmultiply() to return the inner product for a row times a
column vector and the outer product for a column times a row and get rid
of outerproduct() altogether?  Along the same lines, shouldn't
transpose() applied to a row vector yield a column vector and vice
versa?  Don't shout at me---I'm just asking :-)

-- 
Stephen Walton, Professor, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Cal State
Northridge
stephen.walton at csun.edu